Your Old Sweatshirt
10.1.06

There was only one shirt left.
It was a sad scrap, somehow scavenged
by a foresighted vulture
who knew we’d only miss you more
once no part of you remained.

The house wasn’t respectable enough
to have an attic full of forgetting
so we hurried it away into the closets
passing it between us, letting it slumber
on our unease.

It waited until the sky skied
down heaven’s hills and whited out the trees
until only sketches of knotted branches
prickled from below the froth
and I was cold, so cold.

It crawled towards me on comfortable arms
that smelled like skeletons and love.
I curtained myself in a snowdrift
of fabric, and curled tight
against the last ten years.